Kinda, sorta, not really.

So on Reddit, the people who run the iPhone subs have iPhone 17, iPhone 18, iPhone 19, and so on registered and they’re squatting on them until they become useful. Or Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 5, Fallout 6… Now what some people have done is add a word. Like you have the “Cyberpunk” sub and “Low Sodium Cyberpunk.” That works. Or like you have Atheism, and you have RealAtheism. So you can put a word on it, or something like that. But you’ll never be able to be the “original” because a small group of people control those.

Now with Lemmy, those same people will just make those communities on the biggest Lemmy instance, but they won’t do it on all of them. I use Divisions by Zero, which leans a little further left than some of the others, it’s more of a fringe instance I guess? They’re probably not gonna target that. So if someone made a community and tried to divert views to their videos for profit like I said in my example, I could make a community with the exact same name on this instance. The other community probably wouldn’t let me advertise it there. I could do it once and get banned and maybe get a couple people to join both, at least, but I could promote it on neutral ground, and people could decide who they want to support. Because of federation, even if you aren’t on db0, you can still subscribe to a community hosted on it. Like this community is on lemmy.world and I’m subscribed to it and freely commenting on it (at least until/if lemmy.world decides to defederate the instance I’m on — they have that right and ability. But I could make an account on their instance or one that is federated with them. And that’s kosher as far as I know, as long as I myself am following the rules of the instances I post on.

Because they want to stop people from using ad blockers.

I hate to say it, but I don’t think Wikipedia is as neutral or as open as it claims to be. Some of the article comments talk about there definitely being some bias against anonymous editors, even if they’re correct.

I’m not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said after Elon Musk did the Nazi salute at Trump’s event, an anonymous user mentioned it and there was a big controversy. And a registered user took it down and berated them for it, and another registered user came along an added the salute info back in and it was fine. Or something like that.

I definitely still think Wikipedia is a net good. But it seems to me any time you have a centralised source of information, a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want. For example, on Reddit, my favorite band’s unofficial subreddit is run by a guy who bans any fan cams of the events — unless they’re his. So obviously he does fan cams so he can make ad money on YouTube, but he uses Reddit to block those of others to direct the traffic to his. I think Fandom (the shitty wiki site with all the ads) run a lot of gaming communities, again, to drive ad revenue. Lot of that shit going on. I mean, if they tried that on Lemmy, someone could just open a community on another instance and the users could then decide who they want to support.

Is Wikipedia susceptible to that kind of influence? Of course it is. And I worry about it being taken over by the wrong people. I don’t think that has happened yet, but I’ve seen it happen on other sites.

To be clear, we should definitely support Wikipedia against the alt right, but we should also be cautious that they, and other bad actors, don’t destroy its credibility from within. Yes, the alt right has their own Wikipedia (Conservapedia or something like that) but that’s not good enough, they want ours to be theirs, too.

Is it paywalled in some countries? I saw the article when it first went up and it was paywalled then — The Verge restricts new articles to paid subscribers. But after an hour or two it went free to read and the link is fine now. At least from my machine in my location — can’t speak for others and the Archive link is definitely welcome.

Right, the part I don’t get is, the video of you isn’t going to include what you’re looking at. And if it does you can say they faked it. They could put anything there. They don’t have a shot that includes both you and the screen. They can get sound though, so they can match sound, but that can be faked too. Strip out the audio. Separate the sounds of what you were really watching from the ambient sounds (and the grunts/moans from you) and then dub those sounds over the new audio and it should be passable.

Also, I just wouldn’t do anything embarrassing with a camera pointed at me. I’d cover the camera or point it away from me. Even sitting on the toilet browsing, back cameras point down at the floor, front camera points up, maybe gets the top of my face? Nothing private is seen by the camera by my best intentions. I just do this naturally. I guess others don’t?

Black Mirror had an episode about this.

Surprised it took someone this long to actually make it.

I forget the name of the episode. If you’re curious, it’s on Netflix, it’s in season 3, and it’s right before San Junipero. It was bleak AF, which is why the only happy (and arguably the best) Black Mirror episode came right after it.

Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.

I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don’t get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.

Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.

You don’t believe it’s ever happened?

I don’t know why the CSS isn’t loading on this CNN link, other than maybe because the link is 16 years old. (Probably older than the waifu in question.) But here you go: https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/16/japan.virtual.wedding/index.html

Rest of the world: Yeah, we know. Except, it wasn’t just in Poland.

X is owned by a guy who supports fascist causes in Europe. He used to support one in the US until they had a falling out. He did the Nazi arm gesture (albeit with the wrong arm, IIRC). Then (or perhaps before) he got rid of a bunch of content moderators.

We know exactly where he stands and what he stands for.

That said, there are still good people on Twitter. My wife and a bunch of her artist friends. I keep telling her, it’s bad news up there, it’s supporting a bad dude… but this whole community is up there and they won’t move. I’m not sure what it will take at this point.

Honestly all social media is kinda trash these days.

Facebook has literally had people killed. Some anti-government rebels were using Facebook in some third world country (I forget the name), and Facebook gave their location data to the government. Volunteered it even. Guess who stopped using Facebook. Wonder what happened. Oh yeah, and you know what Mark Zuckerberg calls his users? “Dumb fucks.” Literally. Can’t make this shit up.

Reddit was built on CSAM, they even sent one of their early moderators a physical award for running a subreddit with upskirt shots of underage girls. (He was very publicly outed. Guess who didn’t even protect the guy who helped build their empire?) They also tried to falsely accuse a third-party app developer of blackmailing them, but the guy recorded the conversation. A bunch of people rebelled but they all came back around. I myself got banned for suggesting stiffer penalties for child abuse, and I lost the appeal (I figured maybe an AI tagged me but a human would overturn it, but no). So I figure they did me a favor.

I think it’s mostly the same people who use all these services, from Facebook to right here on Lemmy. And in any group of people, you have a few bad apples. But I think you have to look at the people leading it. What they stand for, how they see the world, the kind of world they want to make.

The three people who replied before you said they don’t get the sponsor plugs.

When I had YTP (I had a trial, it was like 3 months for $1), I got the sponsored segments. So either those other people are lying, or they don’t understand what I’m saying.

So you’re using SponsorBlock as well, or you’re watching videos without sponsors.

Why pay for premium anyway? Let alone a family plan. You still get ads. They can be skipped too — SponsorBlock will do it for free. Google could use this but chooses not to.

They want YouTube to be like cable TV. You pay for it. You watch ads. You pay more for premium channels.

It’s Lemmings not Lemmites, so keeping that same energy… Piefeedings? Piefeddings? I think Piefedders sounds better, though none of them are great.

However, Piefed does have fed in it like fediverse, so it’s not a bad name, just hard to riff off of.

That is so weird, I was just reading about them earlier today. I really only cared about one or two songs off their first album, but Apple Music recommended the 25th anniversary EP, it’s like 4 songs on that album that are getting remade or something. Apparently they’ve gone through some lineup changes, it’s still the two sisters singing and writing though, and their latest album of new material was last year.

Too heavy for me but I’ll listen to “Brackish XXV.” I might listen more than once. I mean, the novelty in 1999/2000 was, here’s these 12-13 year old girls (I think one was 14?) and they make metal. And it’s not even cute, they’re serious about it and they’re punching above their weight class. Not by much but they did alright and enjoyed moderate success. I guess it’s still a novelty if their lineup is all female and they’re writing their own stuff, that still makes them somewhat unique in the industry, but still not really my thing.

So… they let you uninstall it? Or are we talking about spyware not made by Meta?

Because the way I understand it, Meta has been hacking iPhones ever since the App Tracking Protection thing came about. Mostly via the in-app browser. Point is, Tim Cook said Meta can continue to track you, they just have to get your permission first, and even if you said no, they still found a way to do it anyway. Therefore, are Meta products not spyware?

(So are Google products. On iPhone, you block ads system-wide with a DNS filter. Same as you do on an unrooted Android phone, since you don’t have access to the HOSTS file — rooted users are just using AdAway or something like it to update HOSTS. Anyway, Google apps use Google DNS, which they say makes them faster, but it also has the convenient upshot (to them) of going around your ad blocking, and forcing ads on a user who has explicitly configured their device to block them.)

Not really. Most people don’t care about privacy, or their personal data being sold to the highest bidder. People still use Facebook, too.

People voted for this with their wallets.

As an iPhone guy, I know we already have it like that, and our keyboard has always sucked (and none of the third party keyboards help, they all suck compared to Gboard on Android), but while we dread the day that Apple becomes a data broker like Google… that day is not here yet.

That’s true. Where I was, I didn’t have access to a physical one, but could have Googled it. Google often sources Dictionary.com which includes a thesaurus, but also gives AI answers.

That said, the AI gives several choices, so it’s not choosing anything. Still, point taken.

I read about this earlier on Ars Technica. I was expecting a paywalled link. Was not expecting to find a mention of “No Longer Human.” Ars didn’t mention that. Or the chat logs. It was a long article but didn’t go into the same depth.

So, I’ve read “No Longer Human.” A more recent translation is called “A Shameful Life” and that’s a bit more apt, I think, but doesn’t have the same ring. It’s about a guy who feels less and less like a person, like what he does and feels doesn’t matter. It’s a wild book, about a double suicide, and the author later killed himself much the same way. There have been several adaptations — none of them very good. None of them quite captured the book. I wonder if it’s just unfilmable. Anyway, it’s a shame that it’s being referenced here, because it’s good literature worth considering, and I hate to see it maligned in much the same way as the Doom game was following the Columbine massacre. Relevant or not (guns in that case, suicide in this case), it’s a shame art gets associated with tragedy simply by association.

Perhaps the same could be said of AI technology, and it has been. But certainly AI needs better safeguards. According to Ars, when the guy started asking about suicide, ChatGPT said it could not help him — unless he specified he was talking about fictional characters. So he did that (Ars constantly refers to it as a “jailbreak”) for a while, and then I guess (and they guess as well) that ChatGPT just assumed that context and stopped requiring him to specify that.

Yeah, so Musk’s argument is that even though OpenAI’s product ChatGPT has more downloads, Apple should consider letting X’s Grok take the top spot because… reasons, I guess? Grok is still listed despite its antisemitic and other disgusting actions. It might be #2 (yeah it’s definitely shit, right?), it might be #5, but it’s still on the list, and it’s still available. Musk is just mad that Apple is not featuring it.

Meanwhile, Fortnite is the top downloaded free iOS game. It sits on top of the charts. Thusly, Apple has buried the chart and they refuse to feature Fortnite, instead choosing to feature Roblox and PUBG instead. It’s petty and silly, but the rankings do show which one has more downloads. That’s it. It’s not even about quality or anything.

I tend to agree with Epic (Fortnite) over Apple, but in regards to X, I’m with Apple. I may be slightly biased in that I don’t like Musk/X, but I’m with Apple strictly on the merits here. I don’t need biases to influence my reasoning here.